Noticed that (probably inexperienced) tropers are launching a YKTTW without actually creating the article. I'll watch it for a couple of days and if they still haven't done it, I'll do it myself (if the discussion showed the trope was sound, met Three Rules Of Three, etc). But now I'm writing the article without the help of source markup, which takes time.

Maybe some bold text at the top of the Launch Message? Something like STOP, YOU ARE NOT DONE! You must create the article. I know that message appears there, but it doesn't jump out at you. All I can assume is that the tropers are thinking the article writes itself once they hit "launch"?

Otherwise, I have few YKTTW complaints... hell, I like it.

edited 1st Nov '09 10:17:28 PM by Cat22

Further reason to have the default of dumping the entire YKTTW entry into the new page, and then edit it. It's ugly, but something ends up on the page as a starting point.

I think I'm with you. If you've done it the right way, and typed it out in Wordpad first, you could just delete all that and replace. If an inexperienced troper didn't do that, and just left it that way, then at least one of us could come along and have source markup to work with.

Although if we did do it that way, they would no longer appear as Red Links on the "recently launched" list, which is how I find these in the first place so, win some, lose some.

But let's at least get a more obvious message on the Launch Message page as a stopgap!

edited 2nd Nov '09 2:08:47 AM by Cat22

If you look on the discussion page for the launched-but-written article (for example: Launched But Not Written Discussion) you will find a link to the YKTTW discussion. On that discussion you will find at the top a link taking you to the source text of the discussion, which can be copy-pasta'd to seed the article.

We can beef up the message placed in the initial discussion page for the launched article.

Thanks Janitor! I knew it had to be around there somewhere, guess I should have looked harder. But thanks for the bolder message too, no one should be launching and walking away. Otherwise, that message is fine and spells it out pretty clearly what the next steps are.

So add a color to the launch list to indicate that less than five (or whatever) edits have happened. We see the trope name in green (or whatever), we know the page is still rough around the edges, we go fix. Simple.

Nate. Not sure I follow. 5 edits to the YKTTW? Or 5 edits to the page? Because a page can be made in one single edit if you've done your homework. I do it all the time. Copy your YKTTW in a text editor, tweak it til it's right and paste once. My complaint was with "launched" articles that never got made at all.

Or are you bringing up a different problem all together?

Five edits to the page. And so what if the person actually did what they were supposed to in a text editor? The last time I launched a page I had to do endless tweaking to the coding to make the text formatting look right. Five edits is not unreasonable. Are you saying that a person going to a page expecting to see a mess that needs to be fixed would be turned off by an encounter with a page that looks okay?

No, that doesn't seem to be a big deal. Sounds like you're proposing an additional change. I can see the value.

I guess I'm just so used to the markup, I can write the article first, without much tweaking. My own SerialTweakerness shows up when I start getting self-conscious about my writing, not the markup.